Large companies with deep pockets and substantial know-how—like Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle—are investing deeply in ad tech, undeterred and unimpeded by the current leading players like Facebook and Google. (And as we know from the digital past, “the loser now will be later to win,” as Bob Dylan reminded us about the nature of time and change.) Competition and innovation are hot.

A Glance at the New Goliaths

As Mike Shields first reported in Business Insider, and then from which waterfalled lots of other stories later, Amazon is one of the emerging ad tech leaders as OTT and digital video becomes a greater force. Amazon’s extensive purchasing data gives it a competitive edge, as does the fact that it was born as a pure play in connected TV, unlike the older models of such players as Google which began way back in a desktop era. Amazon has made no secret of its commitment to its efforts in entertainment in large part to expand its advertising reach and tech capability. Wall Street investment bank and asset management firm Piper Jaffray overweights investment in Amazon precisely because of its advertising potential, predicting that by 2021 the company’s advertising profits will surpass those of its cloud computing income. Recent earning results prove the point: In the second quarter of this year, Amazon’s ad business grew 129% year-over-year to exceed $2 billion, and it is likely to be a nearly $5 billion business by the end of this year.

Also making news recently was the significant commitment by AT&T to its own ad tech capability, after it had spent billions, merging with the former Time Warner for its content and then acquiring AppNexus for its programmatic capabilities and its promise for addressable TV. At the recently concluded Relevance Conference, which attracted much of the crème of the tech crowd, AT&T announced it was putting its broad shoulders behind this push into the future of ad tech, retitling its advertising and analytics unit as … drum roll ... Xandr, under the leadership of CEO Brian Lesser, an alumnus of GroupM and 24/7 Media.

Comcast presciently shored up its streaming flanks back in 2014, when it purchased FreeWheel, which has evolved into the company’s brand for advanced advertising. To bolster its global reach, and where it can put to work across the world its tech to address a new audience of pay TV subscribers, it recently plunked down $39 billion to get its hands on Britain’s Sky TV.

Meanwhile, IBM has launched a major effort with MediaOcean to introduce a blockchain network for media deals, which it hopes will give an advantage over existing ad tech, especially with big brands. Microsoft has been under the radar for a while expanding how it leverages its properties in ad tech, adding data from LinkedIn to its ample prowess in AI and its insights from Bing search results, MSN, Outlook, and Skype. The combined effort sits under the newly launched Microsoft Audience Network. Steve Sirich, general manager of search advertising at Microsoft, told Search Engine Land that one of its strengths was millions of people “you can’t reach on Google or Facebook.”

Then there’s Oracle. The 41-year-old tech multinational has been moving with strategic, methodical focus to build muscular competence in ad tech. Though less well-known by consumers for this aspect of its business, Oracle is credited by industry insiders for its foretelling of the importance of ad tech expertise—and has set out through skillful acquisitions to build a stack of strength. It has gobbled up data broker BlueKai for its data-crunching assets, AddThis for its data on surfing, and Moat for its ad analytics and capabilities in TV. Oracle itself has claimed these acquisitions make it the market leader in data. Just last April, it scooped up Grapeshot, a British tech firm that helps brands understand context and content in automated buys. The Oracle Data Cloud, which holds many of these assets and others, is used by publishers and marketers to connect online and offline behaviors and sales. In short, Oracle is a formidable ad tech giant with vast amounts of consumer data—2 billion global consumer profiles, by its own description.

There Are Davids, Too…

All these maneuvers by big players in ad tech are joined by other sizable competitors. For example, Pinterest should close in on $1 billion in ad revenues by 2020, one of many companies vying for digital ad dollars alongside Adobe, Hulu, Roku, Salesforce, Snapchat, Viacom, Vox Media/Concert and many more. In addition, there is a burgeoning marketplace in smaller, niche offerings and a healthy startup environment, frequently led by executives who’ve left successful careers at larger digital advertising players. The list of startups would include Beeswax, BounceX, Celtra, Open Slate, Sprinklr, Yieldbot… and that’s just scraping the surface. One primary driver of the new entrants in ad tech is the ongoing revolution and ever-growing market in streaming video.

Despite some of the bearish predictions, the ad tech industry is doing just fine. Odd as it may seem to some, the success of Google and Facebook has actually attracted many others to compete in ad tech. While success has always been fleeting for some players in digital (hold on while I answer my BlackBerry…), it is available to tech companies that fulfill a fundamental consumer need with superior products that brands want to buy.